I don’t have time to check flight logs but I personally landed at LGA coming from MDW on Sunday. And I also know people who got diverted within the hour coming back to LGA that night. 30-40 minutes doesn’t seem accurate. That aside, if you’ve ever done operational staffing, you’d know that you should probably have at least one redundancy. When there is any chance of emergency or two events happening simultaneously, you should have more than one person.

One last meta point. We live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and the highest air travel prices (some part is a function of longer distances I know). We should expect that we have ample coverage, if not over-coverage, at all times for one of our major metropolitan airports. Pay them.

12am-5am is very quiet, at about 1 per hour. But the accident happened during the 10pm-12am time slot, which is not as busy as other times of day, but can still have workload spikes as evidenced by this situation.

ATC should never work alone at any of the "Core 30" airports. https://www.aspm.faa.gov/aspmhelp/index/Core_30.html

In this case there were two arrivals within 4 minutes of each other and two departures, in addition to the emergency plane that had just aborted takeoff.

What is the contingency/continuity plan if the single controller becomes incapacitated while on duty with no warning to pilots?